I was one of the few outsiders to visit eBay and witness an internal “Demo Expo.” The Demo Expo was a way for employees to come up with a new technology or feature and show it off to eBay’s employees and executives. I picked my favorite four teams, and this is one of them. Thanks to eBay’s Disruptive Innovations team, which is the one that put together the Demo Expo and invited me along. The only rule was that these projects had to use eBay’s standard publicly-available APIs.

Here Neel Sundaresan, distinguished research scientist, eBay Research Labs, shows me Emosi Sosial, which is like a tag cloud, but shows me very quickly whether a seller is highly regarded or not in the areas most important to the interested buyer.

Other posts from a year ago:
eBay Demo Expo: Second Life prototype
eBay Demo Expo: Prototype eBay Toolbar
The details behind eBay’s Demo Expo, internal innovation competition
eBay Demo Expo: EXCLUSIVE: New eBay Web 2.0 To Go Widget now shipping

Tags: eBay, Demo Expo, Disruptive Innovations, Neel Sundaresan, tag cloud

Brad Baldwin learns about ClearOne from Kurt Olsen during the 2008 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. Olsen shows off the Chat 50, which lets the mobile executive place calls via her cellphone or plug into a laptop via USB for Skype or softphone use.

Tags: audio, Cellphone, CES, ClearOne, conference call, Skype, softphone, bloghaus

Tags: Jon Koomey, Lawrence-Berkeley labs

Jeremy Hanks, cofounder and CEO of Doba, sits down with Brad Baldwin and introduces the Doba service. Hanks describes a subscription vs. margin percentage business model. Hanks is the co-author of eBay Inventory the Smart Way and Drop Shipping For Dummies. Doba was recognized with the AlwaysOn Top 100 Private Companies in the Enabler category.

Tags: Doba, Jeremy Hanks, Brad Baldwin, AlwaysOn, Enabler

What we came up with is a bright, satisfying rendition of a classic comfort dish, pasta Alfredo. Our version uses marinated, julienned zucchini in lieu of conventional pasta, and the perhaps surprising combination of cashews and pine nuts to create a rich, delicious sauce.

Vegan Alfredo with Marinated Spagini:
serves 2

Fresh Alfredo Sauce:
1C cashews, soaked
1/2C water
1/4C pine nuts, soaked
3T olive oil
2T sweet onion, chopped
2t agave syrup
1t nutritional yeast
small clove garlic
1/4t sea salt
1/4t freshly grated nutmeg
fresh ground pepper to taste
1 pinch fresh lemon thyme, for garnish

Blend all ingredients in your regular or high-speed blender until smooth and creamy, adding additional water as necessary. Serve over thinly shaved zucchini “pasta” and garnish with additional nutmeg and herbs!

Marinated Spagini:
1C green zucchini, julienned
1C yellow zucchini, julienned
1t olive oil
1t fresh lemon thyme, de-stemmed and chopped
dash sea salt

Julianne your zucchini, combine in bowl with remaining ingredients. Allow to marinate 15 minutes before serving.

Plate your marinated spagini, give it a generous dose of Alfredo sauce, and garnish with fresh lemon thyme and a pinch of additional ground nutmeg. Enjoy!

Tags: Gluten Free by the Bay, Karina, The Gluten Free Goddess, Cooking for Karina, Vegan Alfredo

Tags: Dream Home, Lisa Quinn

Rohit recently co-authored a book along with Patricia Brown, titled, How Innovators Connect.

“How Innovators Connect” is an attempt to showcase innovation through the experiences of more than 40 successful innovators in Silicon Valley and India. Innovation is a process that demands connectivity, and cannot be performed in a vacuum. Based on numerous conversations, the authors discovered that each of the successful innovators shared connectivity traits. Although they all had different approaches, there were common sets of principles. The book explores the core principles of connectivity that form a framework for innovation, and contains learning from:

Jawad Ansari (Miven Ventures), Jan Baan (Baan, Cordys), Eric Billingsley (eBay), Marc Benioff (Salesforce.com), Drew Clark (IBM), Gururaj “Desh” Deshpande (Sycamore), Tom Erickson (Systinet), Stuart Evans (Cambridge University), Ashish Gupta (Junglee), Umang Gupta (Keynote, Gupta Corp.), Mark Hanny (IBM), Dan Harden (FrogDesign, Whipsaw), Mark Hoffman (CommerceOne, Sybase), James Hong (HOTorNOT), Bradley Horowitz (Yahoo), Subrah Iyer (WebEx), Kiran Karnik (NASSCOM), Guy Kawasaki (Apple), Emmett B. Keefe III (iRise), Jerry Kennelly (Riverbed), Joe Kraus (Excite, JotSpot), Audrey MacLean (NET), Phaneesh Murthy (iGate), Ram Mynampati (Satyam), Mark Lewis (EMC), M.R. Rangaswami (Sand Hill Group), Rajeev Samant (Sula Wines), Manoj Saxena (Webify, Exterprise), Ram Shriram (Google), Ashmeet Sidana (Foundation Capital), Vishal Sikka (SAP), David Skok (Silverstream), Louis Teto (Taleo), and many more.

For Rohit, the book is not a commercial effort, but part of his passion for spreading the message of innovation in India.

Tags: Rohit Agarwal, techTribe, Patricia Brown, How Innovators Connect, Silicon Valley, India

Here Neel Sundaresan, distinguished research scientist, eBay Research Labs, shows me Emosi Sosial, which is like a tag cloud, but shows me very quickly whether a seller is highly regarded or not in the areas most important to the interested buyer.

Tags: eBay, Demo Expo, Disruptive Innovations, Neel Sundaresan, tag cloud

Here, Harshal Deo, senior manager, Trust and Safety, eBay, shows me his idea: a new toolbar that — if it were built — would help eBay’s users buy and sell products. This is the first time that eBay has shown off prototypes at this early a stage so that internal and external developers can see the potential for building innovative tools and features on the eBay platform.

Tags: eBay, Demo Expo, Disruptive Innovations, Harshal Deo

Tags: eBay, Demo Expo, Max Mancini

Here you see Stephen Chang, manager of Buyer Engagement at eBay, showing me a new eBay widget called eBay To Go. But unlike the other products we see here this one actually is shipping today! You’re getting the first look at it. I’ll also be auctioning off some items on my blog over at scobleizer.com. This widget will let bloggers and other people on the Internet add things they’ve discovered on eBay to their Web sites. That way, your readers will be able to see what items are interesting to you right on your blog or Website. It’s really cool and Stephen shows me how it’s done.

Tags: eBay, Demo Expo, Disruptive Innovations, Stephen Chang, eBay To Go

We’ve moved three times in the last three years and have become experts at selling all our stuff online. If we find that we need a certain item again after we’ve moved (like a desk or some chairs) we cruise Craigslist for cheap or free deals. When we move again and can’t fit them in our car, we put them back into the cycle and sell or give away!

Tags: Craigslist, eBay, Goodwill, Salvation Army, Earth911.org

More photos available at Flickr

This is an Intel podcast.

Related Stories: IntelDigitalHealth

Transcript:

Host: Michael Johnson – PodTech
Guest: Scott Eckert - Motion Computing
Guest: Dr. Michael Blum – UCSF

Dr. Michael Blum – UCSF
It’s one of the first times I’ve seen an information technology be put into the environment and the nurses are smiling about it and they’re saying, “This is helping me do my job”.

Michael Johnson – PodTech
This is Michael Johnson. In San Francisco, Intel along with Motion Computing and the University of California at San Francisco Medical Center, announced the launch of the Motion C5, a lightweight tablet computer designed specifically for use in hospital, for nurse patient care. It features a camera, barcode scanner, interoperability with medical devices like blood pressure monitors and EKG machines, Bluetooth and 802.11 wireless connectivity and it replaces what’s sometimes referred to as the COW (computer on wheels) basically a laptop on a cart. After the initial announcement by Intel’s Paul Otellini, I spoke with Motion Computing CEO, Scott Eckert. Motion Computing designs computers for health care use and I asked Eckert, how the C5 project began?

Scott Eckert - Motion Computing
We first talked with Intel at IDF for about a year-and-a-half ago and heard the initial idea. I think they might have had the wooden model at that point probably not much else, but a vision to actually make this a reality and we engaged very quickly as health care has been Motion’s primary market from the outset. Here is an opportunity to take a market we were already serving and try to do something very different and unique with Intel and their breath of vision and willingness to start from scratch with end user input was a terrific way to get started in this industry and we were interested in engaging with them. So it was a pretty short conversation about how quickly we would start working with Intel.

Michael Johnson – PodTech
What is it about this particular form that has been working for people that are working with it?

Scott Eckert - Motion Computing
The slate form factor is intuitive for the end user because it feels like a clipboard, a piece for paper that they would have carried, maybe a scratch pad, and navigating the computer with a pen, also feels very natural. So, what we’re trying to do is make a computer that mimics the way that the end user — inclination in health care environment for instance — it mimics the way they actually work and so they can almost forget the fact that they’re using a piece of technology because its just like they’re using pen and paper. That’s the market we’re going after and if the software works really well with the hardware device, that’s the type of experience they have and they see enormous increases in productivity because they’ve replaced pen and paper with a computer for the very first time in most of our applications.

Michael Johnson – PodTech
Now, I know that this sort of looks like I think some of the model of where computing is going in general, not just for health care. Where people are working with thin clients not much resident on the device itself but it’s sort of in the cloud, in the background. Tell me a little bit about what some of the challenges would be for security with this particular device because I know it operates on XP and also on Vista as well, the two platforms, but then tell me a little bit about security concerns.

Scott Eckert - Motion Computing
For clarity and whether it’s implemented in a thin client or a thick client it’s often at the end customer’s request. They can do it either way and we have examples of both. What we focused on from a security standpoint is authentication, having multiple levels of authentication. So, finger print log on or RFID badge log on and having that authentication tied to a TPM module. So, you can have inscription within the device and then we also have a technology called Computrace that is often known as Low Jack for laptops that allows you to track if the device actually leaves the premises, you can scramble the hard disk.

So, there are a bunch of different safeguards around capturing the data on the device and making sure that the device doesn’t carry the data outside of the building. Then how you implement security for the data in the cloud or in the backend becomes the feature of how that software or that backend architecture is implemented.

Michael Johnson – PodTech
Now where do you see this going in as far as deployment within the next few years, I know the question was asked earlier about why has all this sort of converged now and where do you see it in five years?

Scott Eckert - Motion Computing
Part of the reason, it’s converged now; if you think back in the last five years, we’ve now got the ability to do thin and light mobile computing platforms. We’ve got an operating system from Microsoft that enables tablets, we’ve got high performance wireless that even a few years ago 80211 was just getting started and we’ve got a push from Intel into the health care industry to embrace the software vendors that are making clinical information systems.

So, there is a number of different technology factors that point to why now, for this class of product in this particular market, the health care market. If I look forward over the next five years, we’re just getting started on getting these devices into the hands of clinicians and health care. We now have the right device, we’ve just now got the software that works with this device, so now it’s a matter of taking examples like UCSF Medical Center where we are right now and doing similar sorts of deployments in a number of different health care institutions across the US. Today, as it stands, we have 40 customers lined up to do trials and usability studies just like what we’ve seen at UCSF and that’s just the beginning of how big the opportunity could be.

Michael Johnson – PodTech
Are any of those trials happening in other places other than the United States?

Scott Eckert - Motion Computing
Yes, there are trials in the UK, there are trials in Singapore. We have some trials in Canada and over time I would expect many, many more. Our focus is US, Canada, all major European markets, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand. So, all those markets are areas where the Motion C5 product will be launched effectively now and we’ll be shipping in a couple of months into 25 different countries.

Michael Johnson – PodTech
That was Motion Computing CEO, Scott Eckert. I also spoke with UCSF’s Chief Medical Information Officer Dr. Michael Blum, about the development of the C5 from a medical practitioner and administrator’s point of view.

Dr. Michael Blum – UCSF
We’d worked with motion on some of their previous products and got together with a group of clinicians in an advisory capacity to really review the functionality and the features that they were talking about including and really work together to say how would this work in a clinical environment? Where were they on the mark? Where were they missing the mark? And what they really needed to do to introduce the concept of infection control and how important that is in the environment today. And really that’s some of their early beliefs about infection control. For example, the original thought was that the thing had to be — the device actually, had to be completely submersible to be disinfective which turns out not to be true. It actually needs to be wipable and that led to a lot of further modifications in the design. Things such as reducing any of the cracks and crevices came out of those sessions.

We also worked a lot with them around the importance of the software vendors, the applications really being customized to take advantage of the mobility and a lot of the team members brought their particular software providers, the GEs, the McKessons, the Cerners and the Siemens to really work with Motion and really developing their application specifically for it and that took the better part of the year, year-and-a-half until we ended up but today where the launch happened.

Michael Johnson – PodTech
It’s a pretty massive structure in which to deploy this, I mean, this is a world known campus here. Many people come here from all over the world to study medicine and also to get treated as well. What were the challenges, some of the main challenges you had in deploying such a device in such a large infrastructure as UCSF?

Dr. Michael Blum – UCSF
So one of our goals in designing the device was actually to make it so that it was as lightweight as possible from the infrastructure’s perspective, from the organization’s perspective that you didn’t have to go back and do a major change. So, it runs on common wireless infrastructure which we have deployed here and it runs on typical Windows platform.

So there is not a tremendous amount of re-work and learning. Having said that, it is a culture change and a technology change to move from a typical Notebook computer that people know how to work and so on, to bring them to using hand writing recognition, to using a bio metric sign on requires some training of the nurses and we’ve gone through that process and found that the nurses readily adopted this technology because it’s easier to use as opposed to when you try to do that kind of culture change and something that’s a challenge and you train and you train, and you train.

This is a pretty quick training cycle and the nurses adopted pretty well. Some of the other challenges are building the images, which way the software’s loaded onto the tablet so that you don’t have to touch each tablet individually, it requires a little bit of a specific build for the tablet, so we went through that hurdle. It was not nearly as bad as everyone had feared and it adopted a pretty standard image pretty well and the connectivity with the wireless has turned out to be excellent as well. The next step will be how are we going to plan to acquire and deploy them throughout the facility as we get some more experience up here.

Michael Johnson – PodTech
I know that we’ve been reading a lot of newspapers writing about security concerns with their laptops being stolen from the VA, the FBI and then you know hundreds of thousands of documents and records being on the individual laptop. What’s the situation with the motion C5 as far as it being for I guess to develop thick client or thin client? How much information is resident on the C5 as you walk around with it?

Dr. Michael Blum – UCSF
So, that’s an excellent point and tremendous concern of ours is the protection of the patient information and the patient privacy and it’s a focus of everything we do. The way it’s been designed is that no patient information is resident on the device itself. The entire client application and all the other applications are running off backend servers so that if this device was taken out of the environment, or broken, none of the information would be lost or would be taken out of the environment. In those situations, where you do have thefts of the devices, if there is patient information there, it’s a huge problem and as you point out the VA and several of the Universities of California have run into issues, so we’ve designed it and that was another part of the measure feedback from the clinician design team was that no information should need to be resident on the device in the environment.

Michael Johnson – PodTech
So, we’re not going to see a C5 on eBay any time soon?

Dr. Michael Blum – UCSF
Well, I’m sure you will, someone will steal one of these as soon as they can. As it was pointed out earlier today, a couple of things were built into it, the RFID locationability so we can see where they’re tracking through the environment. There is also platform features that are built in. So, should it be taken out of the environment? It can become disabled. There is essentially low jack for computers that you can’t employ things like that but people are going to steal anything that they can. Our goal was to make sure that if they do steal it, they don’t get any patient information with it.

Michael Johnson – PodTech
So, what’s the most exciting thing about this implementation for you?

Dr. Michael Blum – UCSF
I think it’s really the nursing satisfaction, the nursing adoption and the fact that we’re actually making it easier for the nurses to care for the patients. It’s one of the first times I’ve seen an information technology either a software application or a device, we put in the environment and the nurses are smiling about it and they’re saying, “This is helping me, do my job.” That’s a tremendous sense of satisfaction.

Michael Johnson – PodTech
That was Dr. Michael Blum, Chief Medical Information Officer for The University of California at San Francisco. We also heard from Motion Computing CEO, Scott Eckert. They spoke at the launch of the Motion C5 Tablet Computer for nurse patient care developed with Intel and UCSF. In San Francisco, this is Michael Johnson.

Copyright ©2006 PodTech.net. All rights reserved. Privacy policy

Tags: Intel, Motion Computing, tablet, IntelDigitalHealth

Also I announce the launch of a new Video Blog called Wreck and Salvage from some good friends of mine and their Ebay sponsorship auction. I really look forward to watching this project. Knowing who is behind it (which I think is a secret at the moment) I expect to see some cutting edge avante garde video art come from it.

Tags: The Gentleman Auction House, Wreck and Salvage

Transcript:
Host: Jim Leach – SAVVIS Thought Leaders
Guest: Andy Schroepfer – Tier 1 Research

Jim Leach – SAVVIS Thought Leaders
Welcome to this edition of Thought Leaders, where we bring you candid conversations with the people whose research and writing are guiding both the buyers and suppliers of IT Solution. I’m Jim Leach. Today we are joined by Andy Schroepfer, President and Founder of Tier 1 Research. Andy is unique in market research field in that he is part Wall Street analyst and part IT Industry analyst. He applies his experience on Wall Street through his research and how IT companies are turning customer solution into shareholder value. Thanks for joining us on Thought Leaders Andy.

Andrew Schroepfer - Tier 1 Research
Hey, happy to be here, thanks for having me.

Jim Leach – SAVVIS Thought Leaders
Can you put on your Wall Street Analyst hat first and give our listeners your view on the hosting industry? How big is it? How do you segment it? Where are the growth areas?

Andy Schroepfer - Tier 1 Research
Sure. Well, from the Wall Street perspective, there were a ton of people that got burned back in the Internet bubble that looked at Exodus as the be-all-end-all company in the hosting sector and then there was Acomi and all these other companies that had monstrous billion dollar valuations, and obviously those all came down in fact, to zero to something probably above zero.

So, in a couple of years that ensued since then, it was tough for people to really understand why would I go back to that industry, it was part of the bubble. And fortunately now, we’ve had a five year - half a decade separation to where people can come back and revisit these.

So, that’s because of the Web 2.0 movement that gives a lot of prospects. BusinessWeek article from a couple of weeks ago; we have a $12 billion industry in hosting that people still don’t necessarily know how to look at. There is two ways to look at it. One is the old way which is the — there is data centers, and that’s a co-location business. There’s people with dedicated hosting that actually own the gear and it’s actually a single device or multiple single devices for specific a client. Then there is shared infrastructure; shared infrastructure used to just be defined as shared hosting, but now as you look, it includes utility computing and virtualized hosting. That’s the old way to look at it.

The form factor — way to look at it is not how we believe investors would want anyone to look at it. The new way should be, who is the buyer of the services that are being sold in this $12 billion hosting industry; it’s the consumer which buys blog services, media publishing, and sharing tools; it’s the small business that buys different software, the service applications, or host their own version of an appliance as an application. Then there’s large enterprises that have big needs for disaster recovery, big needs for facilities, for lots of their analyst applications.

So, the right way to look at it is by customer type that’s buying; and that’s how we are starting to segment our industry at least, in our revenue view of this $12 billion sector. But now that’s the right way to look at it, as people are starting to understand that and understand how these business models are working. The investors have started to come back, and most of the stocks in this sector that are public, and what we’ve seen are doubling over the last year, or at least they are more formalization in how their capital structures worked. So, I think investors have more of a reason to come back to this sector as well as a healthier sector to come back to.

Jim Leach – SAVVIS Thought Leaders
Very interesting; so let’s dig into those buyer segments a little bit, the consumers, small business and large enterprises. Where are the growth areas in those segments, are they all growing at about the same rate or are some of the areas hotter than others?

Andy Schroepfer - Tier 1 Research
The consumer sector interestingly, is actually being driven by free services, which are advertising based. So, it’s actually a different revenue model than people buying actually for the services whether it’s a blog service, whether it’s a shared hosting account, whether it’s an email account.

So that business model is completely different and there’s tremendous growth in online advertising because of the benefits that you can have from better targeting who you are trying to reach with your ad. As you get into the small business, those companies are finally understanding that they can take advantage of the applications that larger enterprises have used because they can buy them in a ‘software as a service’ delivery model, which gives it a per user, per seat, per month, pricing structure, and lets it be approachable by both the user as well as the buyer from the small business.

So that’s the biggest growth area as it relates to hosting. The large enterprise has already decided whether they’re going to do something in-house or whether they are going to do it on an outsourced basis. That usually has a five year cyclical nature and I think we are coming back to the marketplace — we are coming back to the part in that cycle, where the enterprises want to be outsourcing more. And interestingly the dynamic that’s hitting at the same time now is the availability of so many enterprise applications through this ‘software as a service’ model, which is causing enterprises to need less data center space in some cases, or if their delivery model is to be a ‘software as a service’ company, a lot of these companies are taking on more infrastructure.

So there’s as many companies growing huge in a large enterprise as it relates to their hosting needs, as there are companies who have a significantly less need. So a good large enterprise is probably the slowest growth sector but it’s more about who you’re targeting that large enterprise group.

Jim Leach – SAVVIS Thought Leaders
So the buyers of Web hosting services are starting to segment themselves into these different categories of consumer and small business, large enterprises. Are you also seeing a similar type of segmentation in the Web hosting providers? Are they trying to deliver different types of services and to meet the needs of these different segments?

Andy Schroepfer - Tier 1 Research
Yes, that’s a great question. It’s been the changeover from the seller having the power to the buyer having the power; and there’s equally as many companies that get this change, to the companies that don’t. So, the companies that get this change are offering so many services on a needed basis, or on a pre-user basis; that’s how the buyers are interested in buying right now. As you go down across those different segments from large enterprise down to consumer, the consumer is becoming so used to having free services, and they are happy to understand that advertisements are what’s allowing them to get that service for free.

You no longer have people interested in buying a software package at ‘Best Buy’ or ‘Circuit City’ or having them download software from the Web, you’re wanting them to just be able to drive right in and use the service and pay for it; then again, as you go up into the small business and large enterprise to be able to use that and pay for that on a pre-user basis, and above and beyond that the ones who really get this change that’s happened, understand that you are personalizing and verticalizing their offerings; so, not just offering a utility computing platform but tailoring it towards a particular vertical market such as financial services or retail or healthcare.

Whatever the application is that’s going to reside on top of an infrastructure, it’s going to have a better growth story behind it and a better traction and adoption if it’s tailored towards this specific vertical market. Those are the companies who really get what’s going on right now.

Jim Leach – SAVVIS Thought Leaders
Or in a sense that the consumer segment is driving the business segment; and from an IT supplier perspective, a number of the biggest hosting companies, firms like IBM, EDS, big telcos like AT&T and Verizon, they grew up in the business sector. Are firms like those big traditional outsourcers going to have trouble surviving in this new market? Do they have to regroup?

Andy Schroepfer - Tier 1 Research
They definitely need to regroup. I wouldn’t go as far as to say they have a problem surviving. I hope a lot of these mega-companies lay off a lot of people that hopefully go and start a lot of new interesting entrepreneurial companies. The entire reason that the consumer is driving the innovations in the enterprise services world is that it’s easier to adopt something that’s free. I mean you can get mass adoption of something that’s free, and you get a lot of people that battle-test different applications that are online.

So is Microsoft ready to offer their entire Office suite in an online format yet? Sure they’re probably ready, but will they? They won’t until they have to. Unfortunately, there’s companies from Google all the way on down to the companies like Zoho that are launching spreadsheets and word processing documents online, and making that something that Microsoft will have to react to; same thing can be said for the outsourcers on your question. If these services are geared towards being tuned with expensive consultants and expensive engagements, it’s not necessary that that’s wrong, there’s the need for that personalization.

They’re using the tools that have been battle-tested in the consumer world. You are able to more quickly and easily adopt, customize, personalize, and verticalize all these applications and the enterprises outside do think that IBM is at a disadvantage as a company, but hopefully the IBMs, EDSs, the CSEs will use to their advantage the divisions that are focused on looking at those technologies to their advantage for their enterprise accounts. So again, I wouldn’t go as far as to say they’re in trouble; I would go as far as to say they are disadvantaged relative to companies that do get to work closer to both the cutting edge consumer side as well as the small business side.

Jim Leach – SAVVIS Thought Leaders
Let’s talk a little about the startups that you alluded to, that it might start emerging over time. I know you keep an eye on that part of the marketplace. Have you seen anything interesting with the startups that you think could have a big impact on the broader Web hosting industry?

Andy Schroepfer - Tier 1 Research
Yeah, I think social networking is essentially the heart of what the Web 2.0 movement stands for; it’s the ability for anyone to interact with any content and share it with anyone that they want to, in any format that they want to. Whatever website you might go to, whatever application you might interact with, it should afford you the opportunity to use that in a community fashion whether it’s reading a news article online, whether it’s buying a product online, whether it’s writing a blog entry online; everything that you might do is something that should be something that can exist in a social network.

So, whether it’s the social network software makers themselves that actually pioneer this into all of the enterprise applications is yet to be seen - kind of like business analytics, that’s the sector that still exists today with business objects and a lot of mega companies still – essentially analytics need to be applied to every application. We think social networking is the latest thing out of the startup movement and needs to be applied to almost every website, every application that exists.

Jim Leach – SAVVIS Thought Leaders
It’s always a pleasure to get a chance to spend some time and talk with you Andy, I really appreciate you being a part of Thought Leaders. Let me asked you one last question.

Andy Schroepfer – Tier 1 Research
Sure.

Jim Leach – SAVVIS Thought Leaders
There has been a lot of press coverage recently about an impending battle between Microsoft and Google. Are the battle lines really being drawn between these two companies, and if they are, who’s going to win and what will it mean for the IT industry?

Andy Schroepfer – Tier 1 Research
When the company is afforded evaluation like Google has, and is simultaneously able to spend increasingly mega amounts of money and be rewarded for that, that’s a hard monster for anyone to compete with. Fortunately, there are a couple players in the world like Microsoft that have dollars that they can go and compete.

So, Microsoft committed a couple billion extra dollars in this current year to go build the platform to compete. But what’s really happening is, who can build up a complete platform that anyone in the world can plug an application into and be able to like Google, help monetize that in return for access to this monster platform. Microsoft, I think is going to do the same thing; so, I guess, I do believe they are at battle completely and wholly. Do I think Microsoft has the ability to win? They have the chance to win, but this is Google’s game to lose at this point. The longer the market continues to afford Google, evaluation, to the extent that they have it for putting together this monstrosity of the computing platform, it will become almost untouchable.

So, everyone in the world that wants to have an application — and again, this comes back to the hosting sector and say, if I wanted — do I want to go build my own complete resource, or do I want to potentially tap that into a Microsoft platform or a Google platform or a Yahoo platform or an Amazon - eBay could, on down the line. Fortunately, the hosting companies that get this, again are offering utility computing, so you can hopefully tap into an unlimited amount of resource, so you can serve all of the people that want to come visit your site. But specific to Google and Microsoft if I had to pick a winner, I’m still picking Google at this point, but if you had to compete against anybody - if I’m Google, I don’t want to compete against Microsoft, if I’m Microsoft I don’t want to compete against Google; its going to be an interesting battle. Google’s my pick for the winner right now.

Jim Leach – SAVVIS Thought Leaders
Thanks again to Andy Schroepfer, President and Founder, Tier 1 Research, and thanks to you, our listeners for joining us on this edition of Thought Leaders.

Copyright ©2006 PodTech.net. All rights reserved. Privacy policy

Tags: Thought Leaders, SAVVIS, Andy Schroepfer, Tier 1 Research

Transcript:
Host: Paul Lancour - PodTech
Guest: Tim Chou – Author and Entrepreneur

Tim Chou - Author and Entrepreneur
The idea that they are software companies! You could argue, if we were sitting here 10-20 years from now, we maybe looking around going, you had what?

Paul Lancour - PodTech
Welcome to Connecting with Revolutionary Minds. Conversations with IT and business leaders from WebEx. In this series of Podcast you’ll hear from IT and business pioneers working on the leading edge of the On Demand Business. I’m Paul Lancour and for this Podcast, Tim Chou, author of the book ‘The End of Software’ stopped by the PodTech studios for a wide ranging discussion about On Demand software and the future of computing among other things. I started by asking Tim to give us a little of his background.

Tim Chou - Author and Entrepreneur
I’ve been in the software business for over 20 years. I’ve worked at companies like Tandem and little ventures called Reasoning and most recently, I was President of Oracle’s On Demand Business for the past five or six years.

Paul Lancour - PodTech
And now you’ve written a book about ‘The End of Software’ having spent your entire career working with the software industry, what are you talking about?

Tim Chou - Author and Entrepreneur
Yeah, why would you do that, right? You know I think the title is probably appropriate because I think for the first time there has been an economic shift in the software business. I think that has clearly been a transformative effect in the hardware business, the example I always use is that, well, Intel once upon a time was a little baby hardware company, no one cared much about. Today, right now, since every market process — every processor in every server is an Intel processor, how did that happen, right? Well, that revolution was a revolution of economics, simply, right? They were able to take cost and take it down, down, down; function up, up, up and by virtue of staying on that relentless path in essence re-evolve the entire industry.

This movement to quote software as a service or software On Demand is no different, it’s fundamentally an economic shift, right. We are changing the fundamental economics of the software business, which is why the old traditional software world will end, has ended, and a new one will emerge.

Paul Lancour - PodTech
But in the same way that the chip evolution was market-driven, this is not necessarily anybody’s grand-design, this is a market-driven change. This is as technology advances and as users change what they ask for from technology, the market is following that. Is that a fair parallel with the chip industry?

Tim Chou - Author and Entrepreneur
I think it’s a fair parallel to refer to the fact or the idea, that in essence by giving people more technology and lower and lower price point, more and more people can take advantage of it. That certainly has happened with hardware technology. But I think in the software world — here is a simple example, I think most people will grasp, I always say, well a lot of people know what eBay does, right? eBay, let’s put it back now 15 years ago, prior to the Internet, could you have found a couple of programmers to write auctioning software? I said, well yeah, I mean it wasn’t that hard, they would have written C++ or something. Okay cool. Next step, how are we going to get our auctioning software to everybody? Oh, I have a really great idea, let’s put it in the Sunday paper, right.

Okay, we’ll put it in the Sunday paper. What happens on Monday morning? My bet is, the phone is going to start ringing, and the questions going to be asked, well shoot! You know my Windows 95 machine used to work and I downloaded your software and you know still it doesn’t work and my Shockwave dll is broken or blah…blah…blah… right? Oh, hey no problem, we’re software guys, we know how to deal with this, we’ll hire a support organization, they’ll answer the phones, they’ll sort this all out, right? Okay cool. Let’s keep going forward. It’s a year later, my great product manager shows up, Lisa, and she says, I guess, really cool idea, the Buy-It-Now function, let’s get it out to everybody.

Figure out how do we do that? No, well, Sunday paper! Right, all right we are back in the Sunday paper. Monday morning, my bet is, the phones ring again, it’s my Windows 2000 XP configuration with my Linux Box doesn’t work anymore and — no problem we’ll hire more support guys, we’ll move some of them to India, no big deal.

Okay that’s a software business we’ve all been good at this, right. My conjecture is that, that business eBay could never have existed because the cost of an auction would have been thousands of dollars to compensate for the cost structure of what I just described. So, the ability for eBay to be delivered as a service to auction software in the story to deliver as a service is fundamentally, I’ll say, at least ten times cheaper than it would have been done in the old fashion way. In the technology business, anytime you change the economics by an order of magnitude, you change the industry and we’re already seeing that.

Paul Lancour - PodTech
So, this evolution has been going on for a while and I know it’s a kitschy title to talk about the end of software, but is it in fact that strong of a shift to something — this is an evolution that’s been going on, but it is something happening right now that — I mean software is still involved in this and there are plenty of programmers, you’re going to still have work to do, but it’s — I guess the question I’m asking is, is there a tipping point that we’ve reached rather than just the gradual evolution? Is there a — as they say, a paradigm shift it’s going on right now?

Tim Chou - Author and Entrepreneur
Well, I think the paradigm shift is going on, has been going on, you could make a conjecture that every major software company that has gone public in the past ten years, whether that’s WebEx or eBay or Amazon etcetera, which I all count as software companies have all been software as a service. We’re already shifted out of the world of the old fashion traditional software. I think what you’re saying right now is that the traditional world in essence has moved into a model of consolidation and in essence atrophy, it’s just sitting there, most people will say, well enterprise software, business software is dead, and it is in so many different ways: it’s atrophy, it’s over. What we’re sitting in the middle of is a transition that’s already happened on the consumer side by the way, we just used eBay, Google, Amazon, any of these guys, it’s already happened on the consumer side.

What the real shift is now is it’s happening on the business side and new companies are being created whether it’s like Concur and Enviance etcetera all building up in this model. I think that shift has happened. We actually — in my opinion, we have shifted into phase one of this already, meaning we have an operationally more efficient model. It is manufacturing wise more efficient. That’s not the end of the story. When you look at and let’s just use Salesforce as an example; that is really operationally more efficient than Seibel. It is cheaper to deploy, to manage etcetera, etcetera absolutely, right. Intellium right now etcetera.

The next step of this evolution is really when I’ll say; you begin to integrate data and software together. So, let me paint you a spectrum here. You got Siebel in the traditional world, Salesforce in version one, phase one of this new world of software as a service and Amazon in phase two, because most people, when I look — well, is Amazon a software company? They all look you like, ‘No’ well, wait a minute. If you go to Amazon right now, okay I know they have some loading docks with some books in it and what not, but you look at the core of what it is, it’s a software company.

Paul Lancour - PodTech
But from a user’s point of view they don’t think about it in terms of software it’s a bookstore.

Tim Chou - Author and Entrepreneur
Amen! and I think that’s because what happened is these two worlds have connected, meaning the world of data, meaning when you look at Amazon, you’re not like going oh let me enter in the user ID, the VIN number etcetera, etcetera, you look there was the book, right and I want to go by the book or I want to read about the book. The software in essence has disappeared, this is where I think we’re now transitioning to the world where in the hardware world, silicon is a very important constituent or part of building hardware, very important, but who the hell cares about it? I think that’s where we are headed to. I mean software is a very important, but who the hell cares about it? It will completely disappear. The idea that there are software companies, you could argue, if we were sitting here 10-20 years from now, we maybe looking around going, you had what? It’s like, oh I know there are silicon companies but who the hell are they?

Paul Lancour - PodTech
Well, is this — I think this happens with a lot of technology and in the early stages, the early adopters or people who are more technically adept, but ultimately as computers become more and more flexible and more and more ubiquitous, the average person doesn’t care about computers anymore than they care about how the television signal gets into their house. So, I know what they want to watch and so it becomes user–driven, I think that’s what we’re just talking about anyway but it becomes a user-driven rather than a technology-driven medium.

Tim Chou - Author and Entrepreneur
I think user-driven in a very importantly different way, let me give you an example, I was helping a company out about a year-and-a-half ago who was in the — it’s called the Incentive Management business. So, it’s like managing what Salesforce compensations are like, it’s traditional software company, right.

So, the CEOs like, what should I do and I’m going to just move to software as a service, get out of the traditional world, move to software as a service. Okay great, six months ago I’m talking to him and he said, “Hey you know, we made the transition, you know we’re now software as a service,” I said, “That’s cool.” He said, “What’s next?” and I said, “Well, what’s next is that as I said the data and the applications come together, these are indistinguishable from each other” and he goes, “Well, that’s really weird, because you know what question I get asked now the most is what Salesforce compensation plan works the best? What Salesforce compensation plans work the best?” He is not — as a traditional software company, he would never been ask that question.

All you’ve been asked for is, I need this feature to be able to give my sales guys a 10% kicker in the last quarter of the month or some such thing. He is not being asked a very important question. You think about the value of the answer of that question; it’s gargantuan, but it’s only possible because the software and the information have now become one and I think that is exactly — we have been building capability to store information for years.

Now, it’s really the defragmentation of information and of people that is a huge step forward and we only need to look at Google as a simple example of this. That is what it is. It in essence is saying, I’m wanting to defragment information and give you knowledge, there is a shit load of software — once again most people don’t think that Google is a software company. Go down to Mountain View and walk around; I’ll tell you most of those guys are programmers.

Paul Lancour - PodTech
So, are we running into a problem here where you’re going to go to somebody who’s designing software and say to them what’s the best compensation plan for my Salesforce? Are you asking the right question to the wrong person or do these companies need to evolve in such a way that they can think differently?

Tim Chou – Author and Entrepreneur
Companies are going to have to evolve. I think new generations of companies are being created as we speak, where it’s about knowledge and information much more than it is about a hunk of software, much more than it has to do with processing of financial transaction. The history of computing is, it came from basically being a large calculator to basically being a giant spreadsheet that keeps a nice record of how many dollars I spent. We’re way, way beyond that, and the world we’re headed into is not a world of spreadsheets and what not; it’s a world of information, knowledge and whole new ways to work.

I think one of the things that people have not spent much time on at the enterprise world is relationship of what is going on in multiplayer gaming. Multiplayer gaming is another fascinating example, what the hell is that, it’s software, it’s a software company. Nobody would call World of Warcraft a software company by conventional standards. But what is it there, but an immense amount of software wrapped with an immense amount of content and information. But the paradigms that are being established within those worlds to allow — one of the ways I describe – oh no, your listeners may not know much about World of Warcraft but for those who do, my abstraction of World of Warcraft is quite simple. It’s an environment in which a group of people from around the world who do not know each other, come together to achieve something and go away.

I’ll tell you if you ask every manager of every — in anything, software or hardware, trucks, I don’t care and ask them what their number one challenge is in the modern world; it is precisely that how do I get group of people together from around the world, to cooperate and achieve something and go away, and it is happening inside these virtual worlds.

If we start to learn there’re so many aspects of what is happening in the — what I would call the Consumer Internet that can be brought into morphed, extracted from, that world I’ve moved into the world of business that have game changing so over years but have huge shifts and we are at the very, very, very, very, very beginning of this, and software as a service phase one, which is the one that we are in right now, I think is going to give way to the next step where information and data come together where verticality is important, right. Where if I can defragment information and people, I change the way business is done.

Paul Lancour – PodTech
Can you be more specific about this? I can understand what a bunch of kids in their basement playing endless hours of World of Warcraft is like, how will that apply to the business worlds directly?

Tim Chou - Author and Entrepreneur
Let me talk about the problem or the challenge or the opportunity of the idea of defragmentation of information and people. Let me put in the context of venture that’s been worked on out right now called Open Water. In Open Water one of the things that working on is, really the problem today. Let’s start where problem is, how much it costs service software on the planet? A servicing and managing software and I’ll put PCs, servers, big IBM mainframes in the background. The number is about $80,000 a second, spent by corporations around the world, managing existing systems in about — at this point in time in the world-wide economy is $2 trillion. Now, $2 trillion is being spent fundamentally on one thing — this is going to sound really stupid but it is really on one thing and it’s really on the ability to find a piece of information or a person and that is it.

I’ll give you some simple statistics. This is actually a study that was done at Oracle about two years ago on the number of service and support transactions coming into the systems. There was about a 100 million transactions that came in one year. Now, most people think that out of those 100 million transactions, that a lot of have to do with bug fixes or software. The truth of the matter is, the number was less than 1/10 of 1%.

Now, think about what I actually said, that’s out of 100 million request for information coming into Oracle. Now, there is tons of questions and request for information coming in inside Citibank or inside a Unocal or whatever. Probably in order of magnitude beyond that. So, we’re talking about a billion of these. If you did that statistic, it is less than 1/100th to 1/1000th of a percent. So, what the hell is all this stuff? It’s basically trying to figure out how to attach an optical cable to my iPod, try to figure out how to make my WebEx session run faster. So, they’re trying to figure out information, but it’s hugely-fragmented, it lives in 100s of different places. It’s not that the information is not known; it’s that it lives in 100s of places in 100s of people’s brains.

So, at the end of the day, we already know the power of defragmentation and I’ll make it even simpler than World of Warcraft. Look at Google, all that Google has done has fundamentally made it so that I can defragment an interesting amount of public information, in some useful way in a very wide context and we see the power of that. If I can begin to defragment information in a more specific domain and if I can defragment people — we all know, I mean what ends up happening, people joke about this, but most kids my age serve as their parents’ IT department.

We’re the ones that get called up, hey what’s up? Well, are we really the best people? The answer is no, but how would I know, how would I know who these people are and how would I begin to bring them to collect together in a collaborative environment? I think that’s where when you start to look at the guys like — the technology that WebEx brings to the fore, which is really to say, “Hey look, if I can defragment the people and their interaction models,” so we’ve all learned that — we’ve all come from the age where the old people, where we used to write letters — we don’t write letters anymore, well so we write email but our kids don’t write email, they do IM, and they do chat, and now we’re doing Skype and we’re doing Skype conference calls and etcetera, etcetera. Can I bring together, a collaborative environment which allows people in a multichannel way and where that’s occurring in a virtual world such as Second Life, or whether that’s occurring in a Web World, whether that’s occurring by me sharing applications.

If I can begin to defragment information and people in a collaborative environment, I can fundamentally, in this one little small problem I talked about, which is $2.7 trillion of spend every year, make a huge dent in that, because if you think about what’s going on in the modern world, the modern world is moving all to a service based economy, manufacturing is not the game anymore, it’s all a service based economy, if it’s a service based economy it’s all about information and people. If I can defragment information and people in useful and productive ways and segments etcetera, that’s the backbone of the entire future economy frankly.

Paul Lancour – PodTech
What can our listeners take away from this in terms of taking action? Is there something I should be doing right now with this as the future, in order to position myself to take advantage, full advantage of the future of computing and of networking?

Tim Chou - Author and Entrepreneur
Well, I think probably that statement goes to different people as different things. To the technology community, particularly those in the enterprise side, my counsel is get smart. Start learning what’s going on here because it is game changing, whether that’s becoming smarter about what’s going on in multiplayer gaming or what does it mean to defragment information in an unstructured world, get smart, because this is going to change fundamentally everything it’s going on in business software that we see.

To the consumer of the stuff I think you’re already seeing it. There is not a one of us who’s not already a consumer of Google and eBay. We already experience what I’m talking about. I think it’s up to them and to new generations of workgroups there to begin to redefine how they do work, I mean whether I’m a Ford Motor Company or I’m a 35% startup sitting in Palo Alto. How I redefine, how I do work in this new world, how I defragment information and people in a different way? I challenge all those people to rethink that in a networked environment.

And to the investors, a lot of people say to me, why enterprise software is dead and I well, yeah, I guess by the old definitions of this absolutely, but the software business is not dead, it’s just changing and it’s changing in dramatic ways and I think those that are starting to understand how it’s changing can stand to benefit an enormous amount.

Paul Lancour – PodTech
Tim Chou, thanks a lot for taking your time out to talk.

Tim Chou - Author and Entrepreneur
You’re welcome.

Paul Lancour – PodTech
Join us next time right here for our next Podcast in the series Connecting with Revolutionary Minds from WebEx. Thanks for listening.

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Tags: Timothy Chou, entrepreneur, WebEx, Oracle, The End of Software

Tags: Left Coast Conversions, Gadget, EV, Alternative Car & Transportation Expo

Kearl says corporate design used to be a challenging problem for small businesses. However, today Logoworks brings hundreds of designers together to deliver the design elements that businesses of any size need — from business cards to web sites and spiffs. And of course, you can also get a great logo design.

This podcast is brought to you by Rocky Mountain Voices.

Tags: Jeff Kearl, Logoworks, Rocky Mountain Voices

Recently, Guruji secured an investment of $7 million from Sequoia Capital, the same investors who backed Google.com.

Anurag has more than years of extensive software engineering experience, including key contributions to two successful startups. As an engineering manager in Wisenut Search Engine, he was instrumental in developing its core search technology and has a patent pending for that. Wisenut was acquired by LookSmart in 2002. He also held senior engineering positions in eBay, Synopsis and Delsoft. Anurag holds BTech in eclectrical engineering from IIT Delhi and a Masters in computer science from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

In this interview, Anurag explains the need for a local search engine like Guruji and how it plans to take on the might of Google.

Tags: Anurag Dod

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A great example of story telling and customer dialogue is Tesla Motors’s blog entry by Elon Musk, eBay co-founder, CEO of SpaceX, and Tesla Motors chairman entitled The Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan (just between you and me).

Musk starts, “…the overarching purpose of Tesla Motors (and the reason I am funding the company) is to help expedite the move from a mine-and-burn hydrocarbon economy towards a solar electric economy, which I believe to be the primary, but not exclusive, sustainable solution.”

How can a small Silicon Valley based company possibly do this?

“Critical to making that happen is an electric car without compromises, which is why the Tesla Roadster is designed to beat a gasoline sports car like a Porsche or Ferrari in a head to head showdown. Then, over and above that fact, it has twice the energy efficiency of a Prius”, explains Musk.

Skeptical? Look at the car. It can go 0 to 60 in four seconds and has a top speed of 130mph.

But affluent entrepreneurs running around the Valley in an exotic electric sports car won’t change the “mine-and-burn” economy. Musk continues:

“The strategy of Tesla is to enter at the high end of the market, where customers are prepared to pay a premium, and then drive down market as fast as possible to higher unit volume and lower prices with each successive model.

Without giving away too much, I can say that the second model will be a sporty four door family car at roughly half the $89k price point of the Tesla Roadster and the third model will be even more affordable. In keeping with a fast growing technology company, all free cash flow is plowed back into R&D to drive down the costs and bring the follow on products to market as fast as possible. When someone buys the Tesla Roadster sports car, they are actually helping pay for development of the low cost family car.”

Instead of describing Tesla’s technical details, Musk instead clearly presents Tesla’s vision and provides a solid story on how to achieve the vision. It’s a story we can all hope comes true.

Tags: Allen Weiner, Gartner, Shar Van Boskirk, Forrester Research, Yahoo, Ebay, Google, Dell